Latin Planning for Multiple Students (A Planning Post)

Language is a big area of weakness in our homeschool. It always has been, and I often fear it always will be. We started out with many weaknesses (of course!), but over the years we’ve added many of the things we were missing: folk songs, nature study, and so on. But language. I think the issue really is that I don’t know another language. I know some basic Spanish and that’s all. There is also the fact that Spanish doesn’t excite me, and I think we all know that a little motivation in the form of excitement or interest helps.

This past year, I was really, really going to do better with Spanish. But then I didn’t. It was, in fact, the very first thing I cut whenever our time got cramped, and then eventually I forgot about it altogether.

Sigh.

I’ve had a lot of people tell me not to worry because lots of kids don’t do language until they are in junior high or high school, but the truth is that Charlotte Mason spent a good deal of time on languages in the lower grades, and she’s one of the people I’m trying to imitate.

The only good news in this ongoing problem here at our house is that I love Latin.

I mean: truly love.

I actually spend some of my own precious spare time studying it, I love it so much.

So, for this coming year, I’ve decided to try and leverage that.

For the Younger Set

Only my older daughter, A-Age-Ten, is the “right” age for Latin, but there is a sense in which she isn’t academically ready for more formal Latin study yet. After going around in circles over what to do about that, I decided to use something we already own: Song School Latin.

I’m going to incorporate this into our morning Circle Time {I’ll post my full Circle Time plans later in the summer}. I’ll dismiss my oldest to his studies, and have all three of my other students {A-Age-Ten, Q-Age-Eight, and O-Age-Six} sing the songs together. Instead of making yet another attempt at Spanish, we’re just going to all do Latin.

Only A-Age-Ten will be doing the book work, however. The other two will just be enjoying the songs and learning a bit of vocabulary. This will not solve all of my language issues, but it will actually get done, and those are the best sorts of plans.

The Older Guy (I Can’t Keep Up)

I very badly want to keep up with E-Age-Thirteen enough to be able to teach him, but the truth is that he is (1) able to spend more time studying Latin than I am and (2) better at it than I am. (Don’t tell him about number 2. Ahem.)

I came to the conclusion at the end of this year that I was actually holding him back. His Latin journey has been a simple one. We started in Year Three with Song School Latin, more for fun than for any other reason. We started Year Four with Visual Latin, but quickly found that his complete lack of grammar knowledge was a problem, and so we dropped Latin and focused on English grammar for a term or two. Then, we started Visual Latin back up and it was a huge hit. We had so much fun with it that year.

My son had a number of questions about Latin that I didn’t know how to answer, so I bought myself Henle’s First Year Latin, thinking that I would learn what I needed to know in order to help him. He very quickly stole my books. So for part of sixth grade and all of seventh grade, he used Compass Classroom’s free guide in order to combine Visual Latin with Henle Latin and get the best of both worlds.

Which brings us to now.

I decided at the end of this year (he just finished Year Seven) that my son needs a Latin tutor — someone who actually knows more than him. After asking around both locally and online, I sent a desperate email to Cindy Rollins, who asked me why my son wasn’t going to take the live online classes with Dwane Thomas, since we had already done Visual Latin.

Um. Because I didn’t know such a thing existed!

And so, I signed him up for the online Lingua Latina class. He is over the moon excited. He’s not very expressive, so you wouldn’t know it by looking at his face, but I’m his mother, so I know.

The class description says to be prepared to devote an hour per day to Latin. That is a lot more than we are used to {double}, but he tells me he’s ready and willing to do this because he wants so badly to master Latin.

So that’s the plan. We’re all doing Latin this year.

I’m happy with the plans, and I’ll be even happier if I’m able to sit in on Son E’s Latin classes!